Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. ~C. S. Lewis

As noted in your article, the malware was designed to bog down servers that hosted Minecraft so "paying" Minecraft players would pay to use the hacker's servers.

The game itself was not infected. Computers did not get infected though Minecraft. The vast majority of the computers running the malware were not running Minecraft and didn't have Minecraft installed on them. If they did have Minecraft installed, it was only by coincidence. The game was not used to distribute the malware!

Minecraft owned and 3rd party hosting servers were not infected, they were targeted! Targeted via DDoS attacks to bog down and block access to them. They were targeted in the hopes players would then pay the hackers to use the hacker's servers.

What happened then is the hackers realized their malware could be used to to attack and extort money from other sites and that's what "brought down the Internet" - not Minecraft!

The Mirai botnet worked by hijacking vulnerable internet-connected devices, such as webcams, and forming them into a network that could be used to carry out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that overload websites and servers with massive amounts of web traffic.

By overloading internal Minecraft servers, the defendants hoped to lure players to their own servers in order to make money from them.

Telling users to not let their kids do Minecraft is actually doing a disservice to an innocent company and the kids who play it.

So parents, by all means LET your kids play Minecraft! It is a great, entertaining and not too violent or gory game, compared to other games. Just be sure to watch them, be aware of who they chat with, and control how long their sessions are as the game can be addictive.

Bill (AFE7Ret) Freedom is NOT Free! Windows and Devices for IT, 2007 - 2018Heatis the bane of all electronics!____________________________________________